Inuk artist, Kelly Fraser, receiving her Indspire Award. Fraser recently moved to Kamloops and is looking forward to teaching the public of her Inuit culture.
Image Credit: FACEBOOK/ Kelly Fraser
September 04, 2019 - 6:00 PM
KAMLOOPS - When you think of Canada’s Arctic, pop music might not come to mind right away but one Inuk singer and songwriter has been working her way to share her Inuit culture through modern trendy music.
She’s originally from Sanikiluaq, Nunavut and has just moved to Kamloops. Her name is Kelly Fraser and she’s known for translating well-known pop songs from English to Inuktitut as well as writing her own original songs.
One of her most viewed videos on YouTube is her cover of Diamonds by Rihanna which has more than 300,000 views.
Now in Kamloops, the Inuk singer hopes to continue to create music and teach people of her Inuit culture through her art in the B.C. Interior.
“It’s beautiful (here). It looks nothing like where I am from but we do have some mountains in Nunavut,” she says, adding she moved to the Tournament Capital to be closer to her partner.
Fraser says she is currently working on building her contact list in the area. She left her hometown in Nunavut approximately five years ago and has been living all over Canada since then.
“I wanted to live off my music,” she says. The singer was 22 when she left her hometown.
Fraser says she found it difficult for a number of years trying to get her music to launch until she released her 2017 album Sedna. The pop album was nominated for a Juno Award and won best pop album at the Indigenous Music Awards.
Now, Fraser is working on her third album De-Colonize which will have a mix of English and Inuktitut songs.
When the artist isn’t singing or writing songs, Fraser holds workshops to teach others about her culture, specifically when it coms to colonialism and Indigenous people.
“Hopefully in the future, I will be holding my De-Colonize workshops to talk about colonialism and how it has affected Indigenous people,” Fraser says.
The artist says the workshops will focus around using art to express the healing and pain of Indigenous people as well as to shed light on how Inuit people live.
“We are not a very well known group of Indigenous people,” she says. “We eat seal, we wear seal, we need people to understand the is our way of life, our culture and to take away our culture is essentially to kill our people.”
Fraser’s passion for her culture has even brought her front of leaders at a UN meeting with Canada’s minister of Crown Indigenous Relations Carolyn Bennett to highlight the importance of Indigenous languages in April.
Anyone looking to connect with Fraser for performances can email kelly@kellyfrasermusic.com.
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